In this talk I will introduce a new system for imaging the activity of several thousand labeled neurons distributed sparsely across the dorsal cortex of a mouse at high speed. I will describe the ideas behind our system and the technology that we're using to implement these ideas, at a cost of under $50,000. I will describe some of the technical issues we've addressed, and issues that we’re still working on.
A natural question to ask is how much of the complex cortical activity can be inferred by recording from a small fraction of neurons in each area. I will present evidence from large-scale zebrafish and mouse brain recordings to suggest that a surprisingly small fraction of labeled neurons may be sufficient to represent most of population activity in the upper layers of cortex.
We think that this system will be suitable for inexpensive large-scale studies of global cortical dynamics in many small animals, and we are looking for collaborators to try out our system.
